The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget – not my favorite people, but they can do their arithmetic – has put together evaluations of the four remaining GOP candidates’ tax and spending plans. Annoyingly, however, they compare these plans to a so-called “realistic baseline” that assumes, among other things, that all the Bush tax cuts are made permanent. So for all the talk of the urgency of deficit control, the need to cut basic social insurance programs, the CRFB is in effect willing to accept as a fait accompli the biggest, most gratuitous budget-busting action of the past couple of decades.

How to fix this? One way would be a current-law comparison, which would involve allowing all the Bush tax cuts to expire. But it also seems to me useful to compare the Republican plans with the Obama administration’s plan, which would at least allow the high-end tax cuts to expire. How does debt under this plan compare with the four Republicans?

Well, here’s debt as a percentage of GDP in 2021 (using the OMB numbers(pdf) for Obama and CRFB for the others):

Yep: as Republicans yell about Obama’s deficits and cry that we’re turning into Greece, Greece I tell you, all of them, all of them, propose making the deficit bigger.

And for what? For reverse Robin-Hoodism, taking from the poor and the middle class to lavish huge tax cuts on the rich.

And I believe that all of them know this, too. It’s pure hypocrisy – and it’s all in the service of class warfare waged on behalf of the top 0.1 or 0.01 percent of the income distribution.

With his impossibly coiffed and unctuous Mad Men look, Mitt “money bags” Romney oozes the obscenely rich guy persona of wiping his feet with the middle and lower classes (or putting them on the roof of his car). Despite the fact that Willard (an everyman’s name) Romney is estimated to be worth more than $200 million, he makes painful strides to hoodwink inform average Republican voters that he’s just an average unemployed guy trying to get by. But this predatory capitalist with mountebank business ethics to match doesn’t always remember to pretend that he’s just your average guy. In fact, sometimes he says stuff that would make the Monopoly guy seem average.

Here are some of the greatest Mitt Romney quotes that show him to be the total slimy 0.01 percent guy that he so utterly is:

In a fiery speech to the United Auto Workers, President Obama defended his decision to bail out the auto industry while ripping into Mitt Romney.

Greg Sargent: “But this speech was about more than the auto-bailout. It was Obama’s case for reelection. This speech constituted Obama’s most ambitious effort yet to weave his defense of the auto rescue into the larger contrast he will try to draw between his vision and the ‘you’re on your own’ ideology he will accuse Republicans of representing.”

Andrew Sullivan: “I worry it positions him a little too far to the left — even if he is addressing a union crowd. But it sure doesn’t make him look afraid or cautious or calculating, does it? It reminds us of the formidable orator any Republican is going to have to counter this fall, and the economic climate and real record that buttresses this president’s case. It’s why he’ll almost certainly win Michigan this fall — and maybe much more.”

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Make no mistake about it, I am far from being “anti-Christian”. I went to Lutheran Schools from first grade through twelfth grade. My belief is more spiritual than “organized”, but I am a “believer” nonetheless.

Yet, I felt compelled to re-blog the following article to show my readers what could happen in a President Rick Santorum world. Keep in mind that Santorum is merely a front-man for a more insidious plot to transform this country into Christian Dominionism – (politically activeconservative Christians.)

Thirty years from now, a protestor stands alone on a corner. She is visibly pregnant. Her sign, written in blood red marker, says “I’m carrying my rapist’s baby! Thanks a lot, Jesus!” She has only been there for five minutes but has been called “slut” and “whore” by several passersby. One elderly woman stops long enough to tell her she deserved to be raped for not loving Jesus enough. Others look at her with sad eyes but quickly avert their gaze lest one of their neighbors notice.

Finally the police arrive to take the woman into custody. She has not spoken a word. She has no bullhorn. She has not accosted a single person on the street. Yet she is still arrested by men who barely contain their contempt for her. She has broken no laws that we would recognize but still, she is roughly handcuffed and placed in the back of a police cruiser. Of course, they take great care not to harm the baby she is carrying; the bruises she’ll have later won’t be anywhere near life-threatening. In this, she is lucky to be pregnant; others do not fare as well.

She is not read her rights because she has none. She is a blasphemer against the Lord and has been stripped of all legal protections. Her pregnancy will ensure that she survives long enough to perhaps repent and beg forgiveness. If not, she will be stoned to death in a public square by devout followers. Her child will be raised by the State to be a patriotic, loyal and, above all, God fearing citizen.

For several weeks now, the Mitt Romney campaign has crisscrossed Michigan in an attempt to salvage a badly-needed win in the state where Romney was born and his father served as governor. And in an attempt to overcome severalembarrassingunforced errors in the last few days, Romney tried to connect with Michiganders at a tea party rally in Milford on Thursday by “remembering” an event from his childhood that took place nine months before he was born.

Romney recalled he was “probably 4 or something like that” the day of the Golden Jubilee, when three-quarters of a million people gathered to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the American automobile.

“My dad had a job being the grandmaster. They painted Woodward Ave. with gold paint,” Romney told a rapt Tea Party audience in the village of Milford Thursday night, reliving a moment of American industrial glory.

The Golden Jubilee described so vividly by Romney was indeed an epic moment in automotive lore. The parade included one of the last public appearances by an elderly Henry Ford.

The National Automobile Golden Jubilee was held in June of 1946. Romney was born on March 12, 1947. Governor George Romney did in fact oversee the day’s festivities, but his son’s retelling is, at best, a patchwork tale stitched together from pieces of his father’s stories.

On Monday, the Romney campaign told the Huffington Post that Romney never explicitly said he was in attendance at the event. “He was simply telling the story about his dad,” an aide told the site.

This isn’t the first time Romney has run into trouble when trying to recall a childhood memory from Michigan. Two weeks ago his campaign ran an ad with a photograph purportedly showing Romney with his father at the Detroit auto show. As ThinkProgress noted, the photo was actually taken from a helipad at the World’s Fair in New York.

Rick Santorum declared this weekend that President Obama’s call for more Americans to have a college education made him a “snob”, then spent the following days both backing up his position and increasing his rhetoric.

This sparked a lot of reaction from anchors, pundits, other politicians and even a rebuttal from the President himself.

But as well as taking on a sitting Democratic president, Santorum was also taking on a dead one, saying JFK’s 1960s comments about religion in the public sphere made him “throw up.”

With a day before primaries in Michigan and Arizona, Santorum was about to find out the hard way: you don’t mess with a dead Kennedy.

Most people simply tune out from the technical and Wall Street explanations for the sudden rise in gasoline pricing. They’d rather believe the GOP lie that President Obama is responsible for price spike.

As the improving economy has robbed conservatives of their chief talking point against President Obama, they’ve turned to rising gas prices as the next problem to pin on the president.

Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) “instructed fellow Republicans to embrace the gas-pump anger,” while Rick Santorum conspiratorially claimed Obama is intentionally pushing up prices to cut carbon emissions. Not to be outdone, Newt Gingrich released a 30-minute video today about how “the Obama administration is so anti‑oil” that they’ve forced the price of gas to go up.

Oil demand was actually down 4.6 percent last week over last year, while the supply of gasoline has actually increased slightly since a year ago. So why are gas prices so high? As McClatchy’s Kevin Hall explains today, there is a systemic problem: speculation.

Energy futures markets serve a legitimate role in helping producers (like oil companies) and big end users (like airlines) hedge against price volatility, but lately, they’ve been taken over by Wall Street speculators who never intend to actually use the fuel they’re betting on.

Historically, financial speculators accounted for about 30 percent of oil trading in commodity markets, while producers and end users made up about 70 percent. Today it’s almost the reverse.

A McClatchy review of the latest Commitment of Traders report from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which regulates oil trading, shows that producers and merchants made up just 36 percent of all contracts traded in the week ending Feb. 14 while speculators who will never take delivery of the oil made up 64 percent.

Finally, after many delays, the government board responsible for regulating commodity futures markets finalized a rule in October to limit speculation, a power it was given by the Dodd-Frank Wall street reform law. However, the rule won’t go into effect until next October, as the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) needs to collect “one year of interest data” first. The financial industry is fighting the new rule, but just today, the CFTC took action against a company in different market, providing an example of how the energy regulation can effectively work.

Although they have been incessantly talking about alleged voter fraud committed by Democratic voters, Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace never mentioned a word about Indiana’s voting issues in his Q & A with Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels (R).